— Dany —

The Dornish host moved north at the pace of an old prince in a wheeled chair, which was to say slowly, and Daenerys Targaryen — riding at Doran Martell's right hand at the head of nine thousand spears, with Drogon on a perch fixed to a wagon beside her and Viserion wheeling somewhere overhead and Rhaegal nowhere to be seen because Rhaegal was almost certainly off hunting goats again — found, to her own surprise, that she was grateful for the slowness.

She had thought she would chafe. She had thought, when she had stood on the deck of the Balerion's Shadow and watched her sister's ship turn north into the grey water and disappear, that every league south she rode was going to feel like a wound. She had been preparing to be miserable. She had spoken about it to Missandei in advance, the way one warned a friend about an oncoming illness.

Instead what was happening — to her own quiet astonishment — was that she was learning to be a queen.

Not the one Aelya was. Aelya was a different shape of queen, the shape that planned wars at four years old and held knives under tables. Dany was something else, and the shape of it was coming into view week by week as the host moved up the dust of the Boneway, and the shape of it was: people like me, and I can use that.

She had not understood, before, how much could be done with being liked.

The smallfolk in the Dornish villages they passed turned out for her. They did not turn out for the host. They turned out for her. Word had run ahead — Doran's outriders made sure it did — that the silver queen was riding north, and by the time the host arrived in any village the village was lined along the road with mothers holding up babies and old men holding out dusty cups of wine and children with handfuls of jasmine that they pressed into her stirrups with shy serious faces. Dany stopped for every one of them. Doran had told her, very gently, on the second day, that she did not need to stop for every one. Dany had told him, also very gently, that she did. She stopped. She accepted the wine. She kissed the babies on the foreheads. She let the children pet Drogon's smaller cousin, Viserion, who would consent to be petted for short intervals if he had recently been fed.

By the end of the first week she had, in this fashion, picked up about three hundred Dornish smallfolk who had simply joined the host without anyone formally inviting them — old men with spears, boys with slings, two priestesses of the Mother who had decided the Mother required them to be present, a baker from Vaith who had decided the host required him to be present, and a tall sun-burnt woman in trader's leathers named Khorane Sathmantes, who had ridden up alongside Dany on the third afternoon and said, in unaccented Common: "Your Grace, I am a Summer Islander, I have been trading along this coast for twenty years, I speak six languages, I can read a map and I can hold a spear, and I am tired of being a merchant. May I follow you?"

Dany had looked at her — at the calm dark face and the steady eyes and the easy way the woman sat her horse — and had said, "What were you doing in Vaith, Khorane?"

"Selling cinnamon to a man who cheated me, Your Grace."

"Will you be tired tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow I will be exactly as tired as I am today, Your Grace, which is to say not very."

"Then ride with me, Khorane Sathmantes. We will find something for you."

Khorane had, within the next three days, made herself the most useful person in the host after Missandei. She had a head for logistics. She had a head for languages. She had a knack — Dany had noticed it on the fourth day — for standing at the edge of any conversation Dany was having and listening, and then briefing Dany afterward on three things she had missed. Missandei had taken to her at once. By the end of the first week Khorane had become, by silent unanimous agreement, Dany's third shadow, and by the second week Dany could not remember how she had managed without her.

Doran, watching all of this from his wheeled chair, said one evening over wine in the command tent, with the dry private smile he saved for things he found genuinely amusing: "Cousin. Your sister builds armies. You build people. The realm is going to find this confusing and then it is going to find it irresistible."

Dany flushed. "Prince Doran —"

"I am not flattering you. I have lived a long time. I know the difference between the queens men love and the queens men follow, and the rare queens who do both, and I am telling you: you are the rare kind. Your sister knew this when she sent you south. You did not, perhaps. You should."

"She told me," Dany said. "Sun and shadow. She said I would be the sun and she would be the shadow."

"Yes. And here you are. Sunning."

"Prince Doran."

"Cousin."

She laughed, despite herself. He had a way of getting laughs out of her when she had not, an hour earlier, expected to laugh again that day. It was one of the small unexpected gifts of this strange separated time: she had thought she would miss Aelya every single hour, and she did, but there were other people now, and the other people were teaching her things her sister could not, simply because they were not her sister.

She wrote to Aelya every two days. The ravens came back. They had agreed on a small private code for the closings — a phrase from a song they had sung as small girls in the house with the red door, varied each time, so each of them would know the letter was truly from the other and not a forgery. Dany kept every letter folded inside a leather wallet in her riding-jerkin. The wallet had grown heavy.

The Prince's Pass came into view on the eighteenth day.

— Aelya, far north —

She woke in the dark of her tent at Eastwatch with Ēdrugon's small head pressed urgently against her cheek, and she knew before she had fully come to that something was wrong.

Ēdrugon did not wake her. Ēdrugon had never woken her. Ēdrugon slept harder than she did. The fact that he was awake and pressing — pressing, his small claws working against her shoulder through the wool — meant something, and she sat up in the dark and listened.

The wind was wrong.

She had been at Eastwatch six weeks. She had learned, without trying, the sound of the wind off the sea at night; it had a particular edge, a particular hiss as it came past the watchhouses. Tonight the sound was different. The hiss had gone out of it. The wind sounded — thinner, somehow, as though there was less air in the world.

She got out of bed. She pulled her cloak around her. Ēdrugon climbed her shoulder. She went to the door of her tent and put her hand on the flap, and she paused, and she listened again.

Outside the tent — somewhere beyond the gates, far out over the dark — a horn was blowing.

One long blast.

It rolled out across the cold. It rolled and rolled and faded. There was a long pause.

Then a second blast. As long as the first.

Aelya's breath stopped.

Two horn-blasts meant wildlings. Two meant Mance's people, or some other wildling band, approaching the Wall in numbers.

She stood with her hand on the flap and she waited, and she did not breathe, and after a long, long pause —

A third blast.

It went on longer than the first two. It went on far longer than the first two. The voice of the man blowing the horn cracked at the end of it and the note went thin and reedy, and still it went on, and still, and still, and Aelya was on her knees in the entrance of her tent without remembering having dropped to them, with one hand fisted in the snow outside and the other wrapped white-knuckled around Ēdrugon's small body, and the horn went on and on and on, and somewhere on the Wall a man was screaming, and the cold against her face had changed — had changed, had taken on the particular dry watching cold of her oldest dreams, the cold that did not come off the sea but came down from somewhere else, somewhere older —

The third blast ended.

In the silence that followed, very faint, she heard the bell of Eastwatch begin to ring.

Three horn-blasts. The Others.

Aelya stood up.

She turned to the inside of her tent, and she shouted — not in the voice she used for councils but in the voice she had not used in months, the voice she had used to send Morghon over the wall at Yunkai —

"Ser Barristan! Wake the camp! Wake my Unsullied! Mount the Wall! Three blasts, Ser Barristan, three!"

And from the dark came his voice, already up, already in mail, already moving:

"On it, Your Grace!"

Aelya pulled on her boots in the dark with shaking hands.

It was beginning.

It was beginning early.